#cloudy civ

oh, grief. our lovely friend. a favorite method of spicing up a narrative, giving it new depth and conflict, or spicing up a character and their arc, giving them something less material to overcome. (my favorite, certainly.) often something that exists in passing, only existent for as long as it’s useful before it flits away.

but the grief in this video is different. you feel it, don’t you? it is a thing with claws and a thing with weight, a thing that cloys unignorably in the corners of the narrative. you watch the video enough times and it becomes all you can see, all you can hear. roughness in voices, aching in silence. graves marked and unmarked. this pit that slowly yawns wider and wider until there is nothing else.

grief becomes the story and the story becomes grief. it is inevitable, looming – but it doesn’t start like that.

1. belief in something greater.

the first half of the video is, especially upon first watch, completely devoid of any of this heaviness. if your first introduction to this was that introductory paragraph, you might think we’re talking about different videos entirely. the first half is a story of politics and conflict, of what it takes to organize a nation, of walking the fine line of diplomacy and force.

but more than any of those things, it’s a story about hope. hope for a brighter future, hope for unified desert, hope for an ending they all get to see. if you look through all the fighting and the struggles of nation-building, the narrative is glowing with it.

one might argue it’s not hope driving them and rather power, and there’s merit to that. especially with the outlaws – and particularly gop’s – trigger-happiness, i'd be hard-pressed to discount that as a motivation, but i don’t think it’s the only one.

because if your only goal is power, why let the desert be a communal alliance instead of something with a clear power structure to put yourselves at the top of? why ally yourselves most closely with some of the only people who could stand on the same level as you? and, more than anything, why care about bear’s goal so very much?

wanting to live to the end is no kind of power thing. what power is there to be found, after all, in a dead world? no, living to the end is a goal driven by raw human tenacity and a healthy fear of death, and wanting all your friends to survive with you is a goal of knowing they have that same fear and wishing to save them from the realization of it. it's a goal of hope.

that hope dies in that crater with bear.

2. dark maw of grief

the grief here is different, unique, in that it utterly and absolutely swallows the story whole.

nothing can exist outside of it. bear dies and it feels like the universe goes with him, like the rest of the narrative exists in this unreal haze of open wounds and empty ribs. gop stands in that crater for a long, long time, and leaves most of himself there with the bodies.

bear's goal is for all six of them to survive. bear, fate, sans, sorhin, jelex, gop. a beautiful thing, with one awful little contingency: if any one of those six people die, the entire goal becomes impossible to achieve.

when on the front side of it, it seems like an obvious and somewhat banal thing to bring up. five or four or however many less doesn’t equal six – and even if someone does die, the spirit of the thing can still be kept in getting the rest of them to the end, right? and maybe in any other scenario, that would’ve been how it went.

but when it’s bear who dies?

gop's first instinct is to honor him. one of the (if not the) first thing he does once the shock wears down is fix the sign on the ramshackle gravestone on the cold island to be something proper, and then he immediately goes back to the desert to build him a proper one back home. act one and two are both to honor him, and when it’s that automatic one has to assume it’s his modal coping strategy for grief – but after headstones are built and epitaphs written, what’s next?

the obvious answer, especially when gop cared about it nearly as much as bear did, would be achieve his goal. finish the dream he started.

but he can’t. he can’t, because the goal was for all six of them to make it, and bear’s dead. bear's dead and he’s not coming back, and there’s five instead of six, and the goal has been rendered impossible. he wants to honor his dead friend, but the fact that friend is dead means he can’t in the only way that would really matter. what the fuck is he supposed to do with that?

worse, the person that killed him is one of the six, too. his next instinct, once sorhin pulls him back to his feet, is vengeance – but it feels a little hollow, doesn’t it, when it’s one step in the right direction and another in the wrong? sure, bear’s killer would be dead, but in the process sans would be dead, and five becomes four. it is this cruel web of hope and mistakes and betrayals, and gop finds himself tangled right at the center of it.

and then sans dies anyway, killed by some unseen force while gop’s own hands remain clean. step in the wrong direction without one in the right.

and what else is there, really, after that? his best way of honoring bear is well and truly dead, second best now stamped out, too. he gave him the wither already, one last gift, a final recognition. he can’t make a new grave.

with nowhere to go, nothing else to become, the grief eats him alive.

in many ways, it had already been trying. there's no mistaking the intention behind standing armorless at the edge of that platform after he builds bear’s grave, combination of losing just about everything that mattered to him in one fell swoop too heavy to carry. the conversation with sorhin that follows is aching with it, raw and angry. gop absolutely refuses to take any of the many, many strings of hope sorhin offers him, because what is there to hope for? bear dead and his dream with him, gop stands in the dying corpse of his hardfought empire and cannot see a way forward.

in hunting down sans, his grief is allowed to become fuel, bloodlust a useful form for it to take. but once that’s gone, it’s just grief again, and it aches.

3. above the individual

in stories like this one – stories of hope, of conquest, of the good guys winning against the world – grief is most often a tool. it is a stepping stone in character development, a big conflict unlike any others they’ve faced that challenges them in new ways. depending on the story, it can be trivialized or given proper care, but either way it is overcome, and the character is almost always better for it, a grown and improved person with new, beneficial insights on themselves and the world. the story progresses under this new light, and grief is, despite the momentary agony of it, a net positive to have happened.

this is not one of those stories.

here, grief settles in and sticks, heavy and incapacitating, into every corner of the narrative. from the second bear dies, everything that happens is haunted by it, haunted by gop’s grief, haunted by the irreparable incompleteness of his goal. robbed of the only ways he had to really mourn, gop never gets over it, and we aren’t allowed to either.

from the moment bear dies, everything shifts. actions are motivated by grief or its masquerade as bloodlust, with no greater purpose to strive for. we don’t get hope anymore; even the song that plays over the sunrise with sorhin, the singular beacon of hope in this half of the video, is just the slightly more hopeful ending of the one that played over the rest of the scene. the ending is narratively spun to be a happy one, but every time i watch it i can’t help but be consumed by the fact fate is the only one of the six to have made it. grief carries forward into everything.

(even the structure of the story feels the impact. where we once had clear cause and effect and evident reasoning for every action, we now have fights with no clear justification, aggression without any basis given. after at least four rewatches, i still have no clear idea why exactly they decided to fight any of the battles after sans’s death, or if there even was a reason at all. while most likely unintentional, i can’t help but wonder about implicit impacts and the ways in which things emerge quietly in creative works.)

this, to me, is the true brilliance of the story. there are stories about hope and there are stories about grief, but so rarely are there stories that begin about hope and then become about and, crucially, are allowed to remain being about grief. when coming off the narrative adrenaline of a story like the one this starts as – conquest and fighting and politics and such – a deep delve into the close ache of grief is an energetic cliff, a thing that would kill most other stories on the spot. but here, grief becomes a filter instead of a creature, something that colors the world, and it works.

with the basic components of the thing remaining intact, the story does not become altogether different but instead seen through a new lens. we look at the constant fighting with raw, fresh grief in the other hand and it’s not the same, is it, as when we were naïve? there's a new tenor to the world, and it sinks in like teeth.

4. other stuff i thought was cool :)

4.1. a matter of perspective

in the post-death narration, gop says that the desert alliance split and fell apart in the wake of bear’s death. to me, this rang a little strange, especially given that the next footage takes place seemingly immediately after bear’s death; it can’t have possibly actually fallen apart in those singular moments of immediate fallout, could it? big shifts like that don’t happen in the span of minutes, not from genesis to fruition.

so, knowing that this is a story we’re being told in specific ways to create a narrative, the answer is: no, it didn’t. in my mind, it was likely a situation of either rose-colored glasses or catastrophizing. in rose-colored glasses, the alliance had already been tenuous – maybe was never actually that solid in the first place – and bear’s death was just the final straw that sent it crumbling. in catastrophizing, the alliance was showing some unsteadiness in the wake of such a big hit but hadn’t actually fallen apart (yet, at least), but in the grief-haze, it felt like an inevitability that it would.

i think this also brings up interesting discussions about inherently biased narrators, not just in the sense that we’re being told a specific story but that we’re being told it by someone who experienced it. there’s the intentional warping done in the process of story-crafting, whether done to lend more coherence or to push a certain narrative or perspective on the events, but there’s also an unintentional warping, too.

talk about separation of character and person all you want, but it’s undeniable that a core part of roleplaying is that in those moments you are your character and your character is you, and the emotions of your character are very real to you and your memories. no matter what steps you take to mitigate it, memories of in-character events will be remembered with those certain emotional tones, and any retelling of them will be colored by them, too.

it’s entirely possible that making the desert alliance splitting out to be a single, definitive event was an intentional choice gop made to garner specific responses in the viewer. i think it’s equally as likely that that is just genuinely what it felt like to him in the moment, and thus any recall of that event will forever be with that perspective.

this question of perspective versus fact extends to the rest of the video, too. in particular, i question some of the pre-death portion of the video; was it really all working out as well for them as it was painted? obviously we see the conflicts and the steps taken to resolve them, but are they really resolved? are there other, uglier conflicts that we don’t see? and again, how much of that is intentional story-crafting, and how much of it is just gop’s honest perspective on it coloring his retelling of events?

4.2. an intertwined narrator

after gop dies, we don’t hear his voice or see him at all for the rest of the video. this could just be a nice little choice to make to show the impact of death at the end of a video about grief, and to leave a hole in those last moments of the video as a purposeful display. this could also have some interesting implications for just how separate – or not at all separate – the narrator and character are here.

because if the narrator effectively dies with the character, wouldn’t it follow that they’re one and the same? at the very least, it’s proof that they impact each other in very meaningful and real ways. evidence to the fact that the story we’re being presented is far less rooted in fact and much more rooted in perspective that it necessarily seems to be at face value.

4.3. more wither thoughts

to me, gop’s choice to put the wither away is a combination of things. for one, with his hope so thoroughly extinguished, he simply doesn’t have enough care for this war or this world anymore to unleash something as monumental as the wither on it. but moreso, i think giving it to bear feels like the last material way he can honor bear that won’t be soured by the simultaneous defeat of his goal. it is one last way to say he was the best of them, that he deserves this more than anyone, that he would’ve known how best to use it. one last gift, even if he isn’t around to receive it.

i also think this is why the wither getting stolen is important in the particular ways it is for gop. most others would be concerned about the superweapon being stolen by an unknown actor, but gop sees it and can only think, they stole from his grave. they desecrated the one thing he had left of him, and stole the final gift he could give. who gives a shit about the wither itself, when the only remnants of bear are being torn out of his hands? when the server seems so damn determined to forget him? gop doesn’t care about the end of the world anymore – his world ended long before that, on bare stone at the bottom of a crater. but his grief sees memory being erased and screams.

4.4. environmental agreeance

obsessed with the fact that when gop returns to rivertown after bear’s death it’s mysteriously in ruins. it really truly just drives home the fact that everything in his life has fallen apart around him, this perfect physical manifestation of social events and personal emotional turmoil. also something to be said for the fact that the highest (or one of them, at least) point on the island suddenly turns from a symbol of power to a height that could kill, and is in fact both of those things at the same time – i’m sure that was the place he picked for bear’s grave for a reason. something about gravity, of building yourself up to the height you will inevitably fall from eventually.

4.5. time is a flat circle

what a coincidence, for bear to die in an explosion and change the course of the entire narrative, and then for gop to die to an explosion, too. to die to the wither explosion, the wither that he put away in bear’s grave, and the wither that was then stolen and spawn by his own teammate. bear, dying to a cart placed by sans, the person he’d been teamed with from the start. some fucking parallels, huh?

maybe it’s fate, maybe pure happenstance. who knows. but it certainly feels like an awfully fitting end to a narrative haunted by grief and its angry, void-shaped ghost, doesn’t it?

5. closing remarks

what a beautiful, beautiful video. so rarely is grief done justice like this in media made for general appeal, and i am forever grateful that this story was not stripped of it in service of making it more interesting or palatable for a wider audience. and, though it’s not the focus of this essay, the first half of the video is an artful investigation into its own themes and plots, too, a dive into what unity really takes to achieve and the ways in which violence and power are parasites as much as they are useful tools. there might be an extension to this essay eventually digging into that, once i get over the grief parts enough to properly look at the rest of it.

when you get the chance, i encourage you to go watch the video again. think about grief and hauntings, think about power and its consequences, think about biased perspectives and the meta level of story-crafting and biased recall. it’s a story that can take many different tones depending on how you’re choosing to look at it, and it reveals new things about itself at every new angle you view it from.